Wade Davis: Ethnospheric Philanthropic Traveler

In this stunning talk, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures, many of which are disappearing, as ancestral land is lost and languages die. (50 percent of the world's 6000 languages are no longer taught to children.) Against a backdrop of extraordinary photos and stories that ignite the imagination, Davis argues that we should be concerned not only for preserving the biosphere, but also the "ethnosphere," which he describes as "the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness." An anthropologist and botanist by training, Davis has traveled the world, living among indigenous cultures. He's written several books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow and Light at the Edge of the World. (Recorded February 2003 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 22:44)

Wade Davis has been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity." An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology, and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, and to Borneo where he lived among the nomadic Penan in the forests of Sarawak.

In recent years his research efforts have taken him to East Africa, Tibet, Polynesia, Mali, Equatorial West Africa, New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. Author of ten books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River and Light at the Edge of the World, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lowell Thomas Medal (Explorer's Club) and the Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary nonfiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorer's Club, one of 20 so named in the 100-year history of the club.

His film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, a four-hour series shot in Rapanui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunuvut, Greenland, and Peru, that will air internationally on the National Geographic Channel in the spring of 2007. Phantastica, a two-hour special inspired by his books One River and The Lost Amazon, will air this spring on The History Channel. Davis recently completed a third film project, a 3-D IMAX film, Water Planet: A Grand Canyon Adventure, which will appear in the spring of 2008.

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